Poetic Places Trivia Quiz

Answer: Lake Superior

Henry Longfellow took advice about the spelling of various people, places and things from the aptly named scholar Henry Schoolcraft who was an expert in the Ojibwe language.
Modern writers in Ojibwe use various spellings such as gichi-gami, gitchi-gami or kitchi-gami, but all are names for Lake Superior in different dialects. The words really do imply big/huge/large, and sea/water.
Longfellow could have used any version and it would still have fitted with his hypnotic poetic rhythm.
[D]

Answer: France

Chamonix-Mont-Blanc is a commune in the Prefecture of Haute-Savoie in the Alps of southeastern France. It has long been a popular winter holiday destination and the first Winter Olympics were held there in 1924. Ten kilometers south lies the mountain that took Shelley's breath away, Mont Blanc, the second highest peak in Europe. The peak lies on the French/Italian border, an intermittent source of friction between the two countries. Shelley published "Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni" a year after his tour.

"...Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
Mont Blanc appears-still, snowy, and serene;
Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps..."
[S]

Answer: Yukon Territory

The Yukon is the westernmost territory in Canada, and the Klondike, a region along the Klondike and Yukon rivers, became famous during the Gold Rush of 1897-99. During those years over 100,000 hopeful prospectors poured into the region; Dawson City, at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike, boasted a population of over 40,000. Robert W. Service was a British immigrant who started working as a bank clerk in Whitehorse in 1903. A keen amateur poet, he wrote poems about the Gold Rush from the stories he'd heard from prospectors. "The Cremation of Sam McGee" tells of the Tennessee miner who was happy to be cremated because he was finally warm.

"There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee."
[S]

Answer: Thames

Spenser, being an Elizabethan poet, was prone to using Greek words where you would think English ones would suffice. This poem written in 1596 celebrates the marriages of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester to two handsome and worthy knights, Sir Henry Guildford and William Petre (2nd Baron Petre), respectively.
That lovely line "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song" was quoted by T. S. Eliot in "The Waste Land" in 1922. Not that the Thames was particularly sweet, even in Tudor times, receiving as it did all the waste of London, and it got worse and worse until late in the 19th Century.
[D]

Answer: The Gift Outright

Frost, who is well known as a resident of New England, and who reflected his love of the rural beauty of that region, was actually born in San Francisco.

He had typed a first draft of a new poem congratulating JFK on attaining the Presidency the night before the inauguration, but as his eyesight was weakening with age, decided to instead recite "The Gift Outright", a patriotic verse he knew by heart.
[N]

Answer: New York City, U.S.A.

Lazarus was an American Jewish poet born 1849 in N.Y.C. She penned "The New Colossus" in 1883 as part of a fundraising drive to construct the pedestal for Lady Liberty, which its donor, France, had not supplied. The poem was not actually engraved onto that pedestal until 1903, however, sixteen year's after its author's passing.
[N]

Answer: Panama - Columbia border

Keats wrongly named Cortez as this explorer, but it was in fact Vasco Núñez de Balboa who in 1513 led an expedition from the Spanish settlement of Santa Maria on the Caribbean coast of Columbia, through jungles and over mountains, south to the Pacific coast. This strip of land at the bottom of Panama is called the Darien Gap, and there are still no roads through it connecting Panama with Columbia.
The ocean that Balboa named the South Sea, was renamed Pacific by the explorer Magellan in 1520, on account of how calm he found it.
Cortes was the conquistador who fought the Aztecs in Mexico, some years later and nearly 2000 miles away from Darien.
[D]

Answer: Dover

The poem is "Dover Beach" and the cliffs are, of course, the iconic white cliffs of Dover. They stretch approximately 13 kilometers along the Dover Narrows, on either side of the town of Dover. On a clear day their white chalk faces can be seen from France, only a little over 40 kilometers away. A symbol of 'Fortress England' for centuries, it is curious that Arnold used them as a setting for what is arguably the most pessimistic poem ever.

"... the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."
[S]

Answer: Chicago, Illinois

Sandburg was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes, second only to Robert Frost. His anthology, titled "Chicago" earned one of these. The opening verse, referred to in the question above, begins with the line "Hog Butcher to the World". In this famous poem, Sandburg even writes lovingly of the city's less attractive warts :
"They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again."
[N]

Answer: Xanadu

Xanadu, or Shang Du (alternate name) is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While Coleridge's poem refers to it as seen in a dream, it was the actual location of the Mongol ruler (Yuan Dynasty) summer capital, just north of the Great Wall of China, from 1274-1364 AD.
It took almost twenty years for Coleridge to complete and publish the poem in 1816, supposedly at the urging of friend and contemporary, Lord Byron. Another story surrounding what has been declared by some critics as the finest example of Romantic Era poetry, is that the author conceived it while in the haze of smoking opium.
"Xanadu" is also the title of a 1980 fantasy film starring Olivia Newton John and legendary dancer Gene Kelly.
[N]